One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

August 5, 2013
Set in the past, present and an undefinable future, Corin's (Everyday Psycho-killers) collection of stories, fables, anecdotes, prose poems and situational musings center not just on the end of the world, but the rapture of existence. A greedy soldier meets a witch who could be his mother on the road home from war and uncovers jewels in deep holes guarded by giant dogs, high school kids take refuge in a snowy cave while California burns and parents, glued to TV's, sit in bed with trays of cheese sandwiches . Couples, families, brothers, lovers, meth addicts , and drunken zombies cope with what is left after loss. In the short piece "Questions in Significantly Smaller Font" (the title is quite literal, you may need a magnifying glass) Corin asks: "What will the apocalypse mean for narrative?" The answer may not come so easily, but the craft and language makes the journey quite satisfying. With stories within stories and tiny typeface preceded by two sentence tales, this fulfilling maze, guided by a constant theme, is an eye-opening, enlightening read. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

July 1, 2013
Three longer short stories and one hundred very short stories, all about what comes before, during or after an end--of a relationship, the world or some conflation of the two. The book's long, titular work is a series of short works, some just a few lines long. Many are curiosities. With their toneless tone, they read like in-jokes, the meaning tied so deeply to their constituencies that the rest of us won't find them funny. One of the shortest, entitled "For Real," is a single sentence: "Slowly, carefully, gingerly, I began to suspect I remained ironical." Corin (The Entire Predicament, 2007, etc.) is serious about her irony but not ironic about what, if anything, she takes seriously. The irony of considering anything other than the end of the world as apocalyptic makes it hard to see how we are to evaluate stories in which almost nothing happens, unless we are to reflect on the loss of action and agency. Even if limited, Corin is inventive. It's possible that she is working within a set of constraints, that she is a member of the constituency that finds her in-jokes funny and chooses not to explain or elaborate why. In the three longer stories ("Eyes of Dogs" is a version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinderbox"), situations develop and characters emerge as more than tics or habits of speech. Then Corin's elliptical style becomes her greatest asset: Strangeness becomes estranging, unsettling. Experimental, postmodern and quirky.

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